Queering the Pitch

A response to the Landworkers' Alliance's statement on "trans landworkers"

There is no escape from machinery and modern inventions; no escape from city-vulgarity and money-power, no escape from the dictatorship of the uncultured. - John Cowper Powys

In 2020, I wrote a trilogy of articles on the ecological movement and the globalist interests that had been slowly working in the background to co-opt it – the name I gave this cabal was the Green Technocracy. I was stimulated to write this trilogy by the emergence of Extinction Rebellion, and the manner in which it whipped so many people within my social circles into a frenzy of excitement and panic. Since I finished that trilogy, my momentum tailed off, partly because I decided to turn my attention away from simply critiquing ideas and movements, and do something proactive.

This took me into an exploration of what might be broadly (and clumsily) termed the 'land-based' scene – permaculture, biodynamics, natural building, and so on. This has been an enormously rewarding and worthwhile pursuit, and one which continues to deepen and unfold. Some of the projects I encountered stand as some of the most enriching I have ever been involved in, and some of the people I met and learnt from remain dear friends and colleagues of mine. However, in spending time in this milieu, I began to notice that in some cases the social values being espoused were almost identical to those one might find in the Guardian. While volunteering at one off-grid community, I remember cringing to myself as I heard one woman (if that is what she identifies as) say the word “girls”, and immediately pause and correct herself with the term “people with vaginas”. It was, I have to say, disheartening to go off-grid in the truest sense I have thus far experienced, only to find the cacophonic absurdities of the liberal metropolis waiting for me there.

None of this is particularly surprising, though. Food co-operatives, land-rights movements, and the like tend to attract a certain type of middle-class leftist, who bring with them an ample stash of buzzwords with which to beguile and bamboozle those around them. A highly amusing example comes from a Toronto-based collective called FoodShare:

The biting responses this tweet received suggest that FoodShare might soon be learning the meaning of the phrase “Go Woke, Go Broke”. Meanwhile, another anaerobic word-salad has recently emerged in the form of this statement issued by the Land Workers' Alliance:

...we stand proudly and firmly with trans people, recognising that the struggle of trans people for life, dignity and justice is our collective struggle to build the kind of world that we want to live in. As the Landworkers’ Alliance we strive to take a stand against all forms of oppression, and from this principle it follows that we stand up for the right of trans people to live in a world free from the violence, hatred, exclusion and bigotry that are currently commonplace. We particularly reject the transphobia targeting trans women that seeks to contaminate the communities and movements that are dedicated to fighting oppression.

Nowhere in the statement is there any clear definition of what the LWA mean by “trans people”. Nor is there any acknowledgement of public concern over, for instance, 'trans' prisoners raping inmates after being transferred to women's prisons, or 'trans' athletes making women's sports obsolete for, you know, human females (remember them?). Nor, indeed, the manipulation of public policy to allow the hormonal and surgical castration of children, guided by organizations such as WPATH, which openly collaborated with participants of the ‘Eunuch Archives’, an online forum catering to material like this:

The fictional pornography includes themes such as Nazi doctors castrating children, baby boys being fed milk with estrogen in order to be violently sex trafficked as adolescents, and pedophilic fantasies of children who have been castrated to halt their puberty, ‘freezing’ them in a childlike state.

None of these rather troubling issues are mentioned in the LWA’s statement. They do admit that “we know that this statement doesn’t necessarily represent every single one of our members,” and yet they went ahead and issued it anyway, which will give you an idea of how much respect the leaders of the LWA have for the rank-and-file membership. Don't worry, though; if you're one of the old-fashioned land-workers, and you feel a bit alienated and non-plussed by all this strange talk of “nonbinary” and “LGBTQIA+”, the LWA “are committed to having these conversations across our membership, to listening and building common ground, to respecting each other as fellow walkers on a path towards food sovereignty, even when we don’t see eye to eye on everything.” In other words, they're still happy to take your membership fee, but they might just spend it on supporting “spaces, actions and analysis that centres (sic) the experiences and perspectives of queer and trans landworkers,” and thus probably decentres your own experience in the process.

If you're wondering what might come out of this word salad, some examples might be two new zines the LWA has been promoting; “Decolonising X Queering Botany”, and “Land/Workers”. This latter zine, in an admirable display of ideological consistency, extends the elasticity of 'self-identification' to the concept of being a land-worker: “If you feel like you're a landworker you are a landworker”. Now, as the LWA run an annual gathering called the Land Skills Fair, for which they offer a discount for “BPOC” (black/people of colour), I decided to test how far the LWA were willing to take the notion of self-identification. I sent and email enquiring about whether their “BPOC discount” on tickets for the LWA Land Skills Fair would be available to someone who self-identifies as “BPOC” (in this instance, me), and the response I got was:

So, as a white Anglo male with a dash of North American Indian blood, I have to commend the LWA on their commitment to the notion of self-identification. My only further question would be whether I can get membership privileges without paying the fee - by 'self-identifying' as a paid member.

While the LWA appear to be very eager to get involved in the “trans struggle”, so far as I can tell they have been mysteriously silent on the ongoing populist uprisings of farmers in countries such as Holland, France, Poland, Italy, Germany, Australia, Sri Lanka, and Spain, against the crippling restrictions threatened, or already imposed on farmers. These restrictions, which come straight out of the Davos playbook, are ostensibly driven towards “carbon-neutrality” and “sustainability”, but only the doziest of the flock would take such buzzwords at face-value. The strength of this populist push-back has already forced the Dutch government to back off. A sustainable farming policy with any intelligence behind it would encourage regenerative livestock grazing, give financial incentives for farmers to gradually switch from chemical to organic methods, and be issued with the understanding that such changes take time, as farmers adjust and learn to deal with unfamiliar methodologies. But these are not sustainable farming policies, nor are they intended to be; they are intended to put small- and medium-sized farms out of business, open up the real-estate for land-grabs, create mass food shortages, and eventually get everyone so desperate and hungry that they will be forced to choose between George Monbiot's fermented bacterial faeces, Bill Gates's lab-grown pseudo-meat, or perhaps Klaus Schwab's ground-up insect chow. Whether the Davos crew and their central-banking handlers had prepared for these uprisings (the “more angry world” predicted by Herr Schwab), or whether this a sign that they have overplayed their hand, remains to be seen; the silence of the LWA, however, is massively revealing.

Conversely, the transgender ideology for which they have declared their support is far more compatible with Schwab's vision of a disembodied techno-singularity, utterly divorced from nature, than with the LWA's stated vision of “creating a better food, farming and land-use system for all based on the principles of agroecology and food sovereignty”. For transgender pharmaceutical billionaire Martine Rothblatt, transgenderism is simply a kind of 'gateway drug' for transhumanism; the unmooring of gender identity from the anchor of biological reality is simply the beginning of a process that would, for Rothblatt, ultimately lead to a post-human transcendence of the Earth, the body, and nature itself. Veteran green campaigners Paul Kingsnorth and Jennifer Bilek have pointed out the parallels between the industrial-corporate rejection and mutilation of the ecosystem, and the transgender movement's rejection and mutilation of the physical body. Kingsnorth writes:

What does a transhumanist billionaire who wants to ‘make God’ have to do with a teenage boy who feels uncomfortable in his body? The answer is that Rothblatt is far from the only person who believes that the path to a disembodied, posthuman and post-natural future leads directly through the shattered gender binary. Looked at this way, the question of what pronouns to use, or who should be allowed into which bathroom, suddenly starts to look a lot more momentous than the newspapers are telling us. The unifying driver is the desire for trans-cendence: the latest stage in what another transhumanist, Kevin Kelly, calls our ongoing ‘liberation from matter’.

I don’t mean to suggest that the activists currently beavering away to ‘queer the gender binary’ all have this end in mind, let alone that everyone who considers themselves to be transgender buys into this worldview, or has even heard about it. But this is the direction of travel. People with gender dysphoria, girls with short hair, boys who play with dolls, people whose sexualities differ from the norm: they are not, in fact, the real issue.

The real issue is that a young generation of hyper-urbanised, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture, is being led towards the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome, that their body is a form of oppression and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns, or even invasive surgery, towards nanotechnology, ‘cyberconsciousness software’ and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether.

This physical embodiment is what Rothblatt calls “fleshism”, perhaps soon to be incorporated in the progressive left's lexicon of “isms, archies, and phobias” if Rothblatt achieves his goal of convincing people that nanotechnological life-extension, cloning, and xenotransplantation are basic human rights, and that “human sexual dimorphism is tantamount to South African apartheid”. It would be interesting to see what the LWA would make of Rothblatt's pig farm, having been created “to harvest organs, in hopes of eventual use in humans” for the purpose of enabling “everlasting life for humanity by continual replacement of organs as they wear out.” Hopefully, it was at least designed according to agro-ecological principles.

The green stripe in the original gay-pride rainbow flag, designed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, was apparently intended to represent nature; in the newer, 'trans-inclusive' flag, the green stripe is tellingly supposed to represent “prosperity” instead (wrong kind of green, anyone?). Presumably, the designers of the new flag have absorbed, perhaps unconsciously, the post-modernist's abject rejection of nature; exemplified by, for instance, Arturo Escobar's 1999 proclamation that “we might be witnessing - in the form of unprecedented intervention into nature at the molecular level – the final decline of the modern ideology of naturalism”, or by a bizarre apologia entitled “Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption”, in which two academics argue that public outrage over endocrine-disrupting chemical pollutants arises from “essentialist and heteronormative assumptions”.

Make no mistake: we are no longer just dealing with harmless, ephemeral nonsense circulated amongst inconsequential academics. Very probably, we never were. The statement on “biodigital convergence” issued by the Canadian government's Policy Horizons group states, along very similar lines as the previous two examples, that “[as] we continue to better understand and control the mechanisms that underlie biology, we could see a shift away from vitalism – the idea that living and nonliving organisms are fundamentally different because they are thought to be governed by different principles.” This assault on “naturalism”, “essentialism”, and “vitalism” is organised, political, and extremely well-funded; it may not be entirely unjustified to view it as a war on your own soul.

Which brings us to the question of how much the LWA's sources of funding might have influenced the decision to issue their statement. Certainly, their list of financial backers is somewhat eyebrow-raising: the National Lottery; Lush Cosmetics; the European Commission. For a humble union of peasants fighting for agro-ecology, that's quite impressive. Perhaps more interesting and revealing than the aforementioned three organisations, the LWA is also funded by Edge Fund, and the A Team Foundation. Both of these foundations are promoters of “impact investment”, highlighted by Paul Cudenec of Winter Oak as “one of the pillars” of the WEF's Great Reset; succinctly put, impact investment “reduces human beings to the status of potential investments, sources of profit for the wealthy elite.” Edge Fund is a particularly interesting case study, fully embedded within the global matrix of philanthro-capitalism, the soft cuddly disguise of technocratic social-engineering; Edge's Rose Longhurst, for instance, has direct links to George Soros's Open Society Foundation, as well as indirect links to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tellingly, Edge co-founder Sophie Pritchard was an early advocate of the current attack on animal agriculture in the name of “climate-change”, publicising a 2009 report that claimed “intensive animal farming is better for the environment than extensive farming”, and commenting: “[w]hen it comes to animal agriculture there isn’t a sustainable, environmentally responsible solution... the best option for the environment is to eat a plant-based diet; no one can argue with that.” In fact, on August 20 2022, the LWA revealed their hand by tweeting “production and consumption of animal products MUST be reduced.” I wonder what hard-pressed organic livestock farmers who look to the LWA for representation would feel about that statement.

To return to Pritchard, even more tellingly, she is also a director of an “intersectional feminist” group called TIGER (Teaching Individuals Gender Equality and Respect), who aim to “encourage young people to question and challenge gender norms, stereotypes and unconscious biases”. Targeting vulnerable, confused children and adolescents with incoherent queer-theory-derived propaganda has been described by many recent commentators as grooming. As the results have ranged from mastectomy scars and disrupted hormones to pre-teens performing sexualised drag shows for adults, the description strikes me as quite reasonable.

Nonetheless, it is not necessary to assume that it's a simple case of these groups handing over the cash and directly dictating which woke-agendas their beneficiaries have to support on any given week. In Matthias Desmet's theory of “mass formation”, the most profound and effective social-engineering campaigns make use of a feedback-loop; once the process is set in motion through the dissemination of propaganda, a crowd, or mass, develops which begins to make demands upon the rest of society that the technocrats are only too happy to act upon. The money given to the LWA is simply the icing on the cake; while undercover state infiltration is not an unlikely possibility, it may not even have been necessary. Harrison Koehli, in his analysis of Desmet's theory, points out “the fact that it was the students who first demanded woke totalitarianism on campus, not administrations... for top-down conspiracies vs. bottom-up emergence, here the matter isn’t either/or, but both/and.” The conditions for the LWA's fall from grace were set up a long time ago, perhaps before the organization was even officially founded.

One thing is abundantly clear to me: none of the advocates of gender fluidity, etc., know what they are talking about. By this I mean, none of them can coherently explain what gender fluidity is, what causes it, or what some of the likely outcomes are of treating it as a problem of the incongruity between a hypothetical identity-self and the biology it is housed in, rather than as a psychological phenomenon to be observed, explored, and fully understood, before attempting to formulate how best to approach it. - Jasun Horsley, “The Age of Advanced Incoherence”

In justifying the bafflingly non-Euclidean geometry of contemporary gender discourse, attempts have been made to appeal to the authority of 'indigenous wisdom', with simplistic fictions about “two spirits” and suchlike. A heady brew of Marxist dialectics, post-modern obfuscation, and a teensy smattering of New Age pop-psychology, and out of this bubbling cauldron comes the sort of narrative which dictates that “gender is a colonial imposition”, and so on. A childish and simplistic reading of history, that divides the entire human species into virtuous (and surprisingly homogenous) oppressed people of varying intersectional identities, and the wicked oppressors and imperialists, also remarkably homogenous. This is the context in which I imagine the well-meaning young employees and volunteers of the LWA could justify their “BPOC discounts” and “trans-positive” statements. The awkward juxtaposition of a 'peasant's movement' campaign group espousing the technocratic transhumanist vision of medically-assisted genderfluidity could presumably be seen as perfectly reasonable in this context. Ironically, these revisionists are perpetrating their own form of “gender colonialism”, collapsing the enormous diversity of attitudes towards sex and gender amongst indigenous peoples into a rainbow-painted monolith. As Stone Age Herbalist has revealed, the notion of the “two-spirit”, purportedly of North American Ojibwe origin, was in fact concocted by a two white men, Harry Hay and Will Roscoe; the former was also an activist with paedophile-advocacy group NAMBLA, a good example of how the Western 'sexual liberation' movement has always been a complex and nuanced set of social phenomena, with the more sympathetic and reasonable elements sometimes difficult to fully disentangle from the darker and more dubious ones.

We live in a culture in which personhood is denied to infants, who are habitually referred to with the pronoun “it”; as such, post-natal abortion is now being normalised. At the same time, the “right” to make informed decisions about matters of gender and sexual identity is being given to children, when it's far from obvious whether most adults are currently in a fit state to work through these issues. None of the 'nonbinary' individuals with whom I have conversed have, thus far, been able to precisely define their self-described ontological state; there appears to be no clear dividing line between 'nonbinary' and 'non-nonbinary'. Nobody seems to know what this term actually means, on a deep, visceral, embodied level; at the same time, words referring to biological sex and parenthood are gradually being excised from our vocabulary, to be replaced with linguistic monstrosities like “birth-givers”, “menstruators”, and “people with cervixes”. As such, the pressure not to 'misgender anyone' rests on the assumption that following these bizarre new social-codes is fundamentally for the benefit of others, which (like mask-wearing, or vaxx-taking) is far from obviously being the case. The social pressure to use language that feels awkward, hollow, or contradictory to our own experience serves to drive a wedge between our lived experience of reality, and the conceptual matrix used to understand and express that experience. Theodore Dalrymple's quote on Communist propaganda is quite illuminating in this context:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. (Frontpage Interview with Theodore Dalrymple; emphasis added)

Post-modern academic lingo, propagandistic declarations (“stay safe”, etc), and politically correct newspeak all rely on the individual's willingness to say words that have no fundamental intent beyond signifying one's allegiance to a particular regime or bureaucratic system. The LWA's statement finishes with an attempt to anchor these empty slogans and buzzwords with an embarrassingly effusive finale:

So let’s return to that forest at the edge of a lovingly planted field of crops. Smell the ripening fruit, dig your toes into the soft moss of the forest floor, listen to the countless creatures that pollinate the blossoms and turn the remains of plants and animals into the rich soil that feeds us. Know that the world around us is teeming with life, and in its beauty, none of it fits into the rigid and lifeless categories that strangle the will to create, to explore, to survive. It’s from this forest that we send this statement, a love letter to all those who, both now and in times past, trespass against the borders erected around private property, class, gender, the right to call a place home and the ways that we love and move through the good earth that is our home.

If it's difficult to quite grasp the intended meaning of the above paragraph, that's because the medium is the message; it has no function other than to ground the statement's support of gender-ideology within a context that the LWA's membership would find relatable. By concluding like this, the authors of the statement have revealed that they themselves realise on some level that postmodern gender-ideology is, at best, completely irrelevant to the issues the LWA focuses on, or they would not have felt the need to use NLP-style advertising tactics in their finishing paragraph. The twee, saccharine, and gushing tone qualifies this particular passage as an excellent example of what Milan Kundera calls “political kitsch”, the mawkish and gaudy aesthetic employed by propaganda-merchants from Communist Russia to Capitalist America. Modernity infantilises, emasculates, and castrates, in every possible way; a trade union or campaign group which issues such inane platitudes is signalling to the ruling order that, whatever challenges it may present on specific issues, it poses no substantial threat to the regime, offers no compelling alternative, and will bend the knee to the Current Thing.

The editors of The Land magazine warn in their published commentary on the LWA's statement that the LWA are “at risk of losing credibility and valuable members”. This is no doubt the case, and the LWA are now doubling-down on a set of internal contradictions that will undermine their entire project. They are beset by a distorted and myopic vision, in which a multi-million dollar industry of drugs and surgical interventions dependent on the fossil-fuel economy is somehow compatible with agro-ecology and land-rights. They boldly claim to represent land-workers, but show their true colours by supporting for the attack on livestock farming directed by the Davos elite. If the LWA ends up gutted and bankrupt on the institutional compost-heap within the next decade or two, they will have nobody but themselves to blame.